In his book Believer: My Forty Years In Politics, Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod offered this account of Romney's call:

"Obama said the appropriate things, congratulating his opponent on a hard- fought race and wishing Romney’s family well. He was unsmiling during the call, and slightly irritated when it was over. 'He said, ‘We were surprised. You really did a great job of getting the vote out in places like Cleveland and Milwaukee.’ In other words, black people,' the president said. 'That’s what he thinks this was all about.'"

It didn't happen that way, Romney told Yahoo News:

"I remember going into the room with a few of my staff people, picking up the phone and being as gracious as I could possibly be at a very difficult time, and congratulating the president on winning and congratulating him on having a good campaign and running a good campaign.

"I may well have said what a good job they did turning people out, because they did -- by the way, I don’t even know what happened in Milwaukee, so some of those quotes are obviously a misunderstanding."

Axelrod says he stands by his account 100%.

In an e-mail, Axelrod writes he doesn't think Romney was being ungracious. But in complimenting the Obama campaign's get-out-the-vote efforts, Romney made references that the president interpreted as though he did, according to Axelrod.

"I think it reflected how two men, at the end of a long and competitive race, were looking at things through different prisms," Axelrod writes.